For the morning after, a somber celebration

A friend of mine put it
best: the morning after the election, you could almost feel a great sigh of
relief rising up from the country.

The polls had shown
widespread dissatisfaction with Republicans in Washington, particularly with the Bush administration, but it
was hard to hope. Polls can be wrong. TV ads work. All politics is local.

In the end, independents and
many Republicans (conservatives as well as moderates) had had enough, and they
joined Democrats to take the House and the Senate away from the Bush
administration and its supporters.

In our house, there were no
cheers. Only relief.

And I haven't heard cheers
from the people I've talked to and heard from since election night. Only
relief.

Maybe the pols in the
Democratic Party are cheering. Maybe they've been slapping hands and plotting
retribution. But the people I've talked to and heard from have simply been
relieved: relieved that there's a repudiation of the Bush policies, and that there'll
be a check on the Bush madness.

Lord knows there's plenty to
check, and plenty to do. There's the nomination of Iran-Contra veteran Robert
Gates to become Secretary of State. (War critic Joe Biden, saying he'll vote
for Gates, explained to the New York Times: "To put it very, very bluntly, as
long as he's not there, Rumsfeld is there.") There's energy, and health care,
and fiscal responsibility, and the protection of Americans' individual rights.

But looming over them all is
Iraq. Within the next few weeks, the Iraq Study Group
will make its recommendations. The Bush administration may be looking for cover
from it, but it's unlikely that the committee will come up with something that
other people haven't already proposed. The response will be up to the Bush
administration. And then we'll see just how much change we're getting from the
change at Defense.

Meantime, the horror in Iraq goes on. Day after day, more killings, more
kidnappings, more torture.

The tragedy is that we created
all this. We put Iraqis in the midst of this horror, so we should deliver them
from it. But we cannot. There is no good way out.

And the people who will bear
almost all of the pain are the Iraqis.

We have lost precious young
men and women of our own in this war, and the Bush administration --- not
Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush administration --- bears the burden of responsibility
for that. But as searingly painful as each of those losses is, the pain in Iraq is worse. The pain for Iraqi families is
unimaginable.

It is our fault, and none of
us can turn away from that. The people who approved the Iraq war --- and much of what has come since --- were
elected by the public, presumably, fairly (the first Bush victory excepted).

And so the blame is ours.

On another note: what do you suppose is the matter with Upstate New York? Voters in many
parts of the country knew this was a referendum on the Bush administration. Not
us. We're blithely sending back to Congress three Republicans who have marched
right alongside the president. One of them was in charge of getting Republicans
elected to the House.

And I'm still befuddled
about the Democrat and Chronicle's endorsements. The daily's editorial-page
editors did manage to go for Eric Massa over Randy Kuhl. Maybe that's because
Kuhl's a relative newcomer. But they embraced Jim Walsh and Tom Reynolds --- in
large part, apparently, because of the goodies they send this way from Washington. Obviously pork is a more serious concern than the
war, torture, and attacks on the Bill of Rights.

At least the ads will
stop. Campaign reform is one of the most important issues facing the country,
but concern about it will fade until the next onslaught. It's not just the tone
of this particular election, bad as that was. It's the amount of money spent:
$2.6 billion on Congressional campaigns, according to the latest report I saw.
Think what the country could do with that.

On election night, CNN's Lou Dobbs launched into a tirade.
"Obscene," he growled. Yes, indeed. Take the influence-buying that is the purpose
of campaign donations and add the simplistic, distorted, emotional appeal of
the campaign ads, and you have an attack on democracy of major proportions.